Jorge Luis Borges

“Andere mögen sich der Bücher rühmen, die sie geschrieben haben, mein Ruhm sind die Bücher, die ich gelesen habe.”

“I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.”

“A la realidad le gustan las simetrías y los leves anacronismos”

“As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.”

“We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.”

“There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.”

“The web of time - the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries - embraces "every" possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist.”

“God has created nights well-populatedwith dreams, crowded with mirror images,so that man may feel that he is nothing morethan vain reflection. That's what frightens us.”

“Il libro non è un ente chiuso alla comunicazione: è una relazione, è un asse di innumerevoli relazioni.”

“Emma dropped the letter. The first thing she felt was a sinking in her stomach and a trembling in her knees; then, a sense of blind guilt, of unreality, of cold, of fear; then, a desire for this day to be past. Then immediately she realized that such a wish was pointless, for her father's death was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening, endlessly, forever after.”

“What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?”

“it is also said that it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher”

“Uno no es lo que es por lo que escribe, sino por lo que ha leído.”

“A mí se me hace cuento que empezó Buenos Aires: La juzgo tan eterna como el agua y como el aire.”

“[Buenos Aires]No nos une el amor sino el espanto.Será por eso que la quiero tanto”

“Y no comprendo cómo el tiempo pasaYo, que soy tiempo y sangre y agonía.”

“Things duplicate themselves in Tlön; they also tend to grow vague or ‘sketchy,’ and to lose detail when they begin to be forgotten. The classic example is the doorway that continued to exist so long as a certain beggar frequented it, but which was lost to sight when he died. Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.' - Jorge Luis Borges, 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

“La muerte es una vida vivida. La vida es una muerte que viene.”

“The image of the Lord has been replaced by a mirror.”

“Gradually, the concrete enigma I labored at disturbed me less than the generic enigma of a sentence written by a god. What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an absolute mind construct? I considered that even in the human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe: to say "the tiger" is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the grass on which the deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass, the heaven that gave birth to the earth. I considered that in the language of a god every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation of facts, and not in an implicit but in an explicit manner, and not progressively but instantaneously. In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous. A god, I reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in that word absolute fullness. No word uttered by him can be inferior to the universe or less than the sum total of time.”

“Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.”

“So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.”

“Considerai anche che nei linguaggi umani non c'è proposizione che non implichi l'universo intero; dire la tigre è dire le tigri che la generarono, i cervi e le testuggini che divorò, il pascolo di cui si alimentarono i cervi, la terra che fu madre del pascolo, il cielo che dette luce alla terra.”

“Per il candore e la semplicità della sua vita, c'è chi lo giudica un angelo; è una pietosa esagerazione, poiché non c'è uomo che sia esente da colpa.”

“In via Belgrano presi un tassì; insonne, invasato, quasi felice, pensai che nulla è meno materiale del denaro, giacché qualsiasi momenta (una moneta da venti centesimi, ad esempio) è, a rigore, un repertorio di futuri possibili. Il denaro è un ente astratto, ripetei, è tempo futuro. Può essere un pomeriggio in campagna, può essere musica di Brahms, può essere carte geografiche, può essere giuoco di scacchi, può essere caffé, può essere le parole di Epitteto, che insegnano il disprezzo dell'oro; è un Proteo più versatile di quello dell'isola Pharos.”

“La morte (o la sua allusione) rende preziosi e patetici gli uomini. Questi si commuovono per la loro condizione di fantasmi; ogni atto che compiono può esser l'ultimo; non c'è volto che non sia sul punto di cancellarsi come il volto d'un sogno. Tutto, tra i mortali, ha il valore dell'irrecuperabile e del casuale. Tra gl'Immortali, invece, ogni atto (e ogni pensiero) è l'eco d'altri che nel passato lo precedettero, senza principio visibile, o il fedele presagio di altri che nel futuro lo ripeteranno fino alla vertigine. Non c'è cosa che non sia come perduta tra infaticabili specchi. Nulla può accadere una sola volta, nulla è preziosamente precario. Ciò ch'è elegiaco, grave, rituale, non vale per gli Immortali.”

“Essere immortale è cosa da poco: tranne l'uomo, tutte le creature lo sono, giacché ignorano la morte; la cosa divina, terribile, incomprensibile, è sapersi immortali.”

“I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech.”

“... soy dios, soy héroe, soy filósofo, soy demonio y soy mundo, lo cual es una fatigosa manera de decir que no soy.”

“Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.”

“The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.”

“« Je ne crois pas aux méthodes du réalisme, genre artificiel s'il en est; je préfère révéler d'un seul coup ce que j'ai compris graduellement. »”

“Alejandría, debelada, imploró en vano la misericordia del César”

“Cualquier destino, por largo y complicado que sea, consta en realidad de un solo momento: el momento en que el hombre sabe para siempre quién es”

“Modificar el pasado no es modificar un solo hecho; es anular sus consecuencias, que tienden a ser infinitas”

“Non c'è nulla di antico sotto il sole.Tutto accade per la prima volta, ma in un modo eterno.Chi legge le mie parole sta inventandole.”

“We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.”

“The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; “tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different.”

“In Book VIII of the Odyssey we read that the gods weave misfortunes into the pattern of events to make a song for future generations to sing.----------Στην Όγδοη Ραψωδία της Οδύσσειας διαβάζουμε ότι οι θεοί κλώθουν τις συμφορές για να μη λείπουν από τις μελλούμενες γενιές θέματα για τραγούδια. (μτφ Δ. Καλοκύρης)”

“La imaginación está hecha de convenciones de la memoria. Si yo no tuviera memoria no podría imaginar.”

“I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.”

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”

“The fact is that every author creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”

“We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.”

“Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.”

“This much is already known: for every sensible line of straightforward statement, there are leagues of senseless cacophonies, verbal jumbles and incoherences. (I know of an uncouth region whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious custom of finding a meaning in books and equate it with that of finding a meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's palm . . . They admit that the inventors of this writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but maintain that this application is accidental and that the books signify nothing in themselves. This dictum, we shall see, is not entirely fallacious.)”

“What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?”

“The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.”

“Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.”

“Habré de levantar la vasta vidaque aún ahora es tu espejo:cada mañana habré de reconstruirla.Desde que te alejaste,cuántos lugares se han tornado vanosy sin sentido, igualesa luces en el día.Tardes que fueron nicho de tu imagen,músicas en que siempre me aguardabas,palabras de aquel tiempo- yo tendré que quebrarlas con mis manos.¿En qué hondonada esconderé mi almapara que no vea tu ausenciaque como un sol terrible, sin ocaso,brilla definitiva y despiadada?Tu ausencia me rodeacomo la cuerda a la garganta,el mar al que se hunde.”